Dissociative amnesia

DID is very much internal disorder. That is, unless I tell you that I have it, you wouldn’t know¹. One of the ways DID affects my internal experience is that I have significant gaps in my memory, both of my past childhood, and of my present adulthood. But amnesia is tricky—I don’t know what I don’t remember, so most of the time I don’t realize I’ve forgotten anything.

I believe I experience amnesia in a few ways. The most innocuous type that I experience seems due to me having constricted awareness—each of my parts seems to act as a compartment of memory, so when I’m in one compartment it may be difficult for me to index memories that occurred when I was in a different compartment of memory. For example, if my partner talks about a hike we went on a few months ago when I’m in a task-based compartment for cleaning, I may not remember the hike, but I may eventually get a very vague memory of it if they prompt me about it further. If I see a picture of us on the hike, it may help queue my memory of it more, but it still isn’t a complete memory like it would be if I were in the compartment that was actually there on that hike. I believe this is because hiking and cleaning occupy two entirely different compartments of my life; there’s little in common between the two, and my constricted awareness makes it so that these memories aren’t shared well between the two parts. This seems to be a version of state-dependent memory.

I also experience full amnesia between parts. That is, I will not have access to any of the memories of one compartment when I’m in a different compartment. This typically seems to occur between compartments that hold trauma memories and ones that do not, but I also seem to experience this between non-trauma holding parts, and I’m not yet sure why.

Within full amnesia, I seem to exhibit two types. The first is when I experience a discrete jump in my awareness when I switch between compartments where I have no idea what was happening just before the switch. This causes an obvious jump in my awareness, and may make it more noticeable that I have amnesia. I might find myself, all of a sudden, in a different room than I remember being in just a second ago, when in reality another part had moved me to that room outside of my awareness². I experienced this when I was younger³, but not as much as I’ve gotten older. Now, I more so seem to have a sliding-window type memory—rather than a discrete jump in awareness, my memory of what happened gradually disappears over several minutes after a switch. This leads to a perceived smoother transition between parts, making my memory loss less obvious to me.

Regardless of the type of amnesia I have, I experience shuffling of memories and time jumps—I do not have a continuous, linear understanding of my life. For example, it may be hard for me to differentiate what occurred last week vs what occurred years ago, and sometimes things that occurred months ago feel more current to me than things that occurred even yesterday. As always, this seems to be justified by my understanding of how I operate—if I’m in a compartment of memory that was last active a few months ago, those memories are more at the forefront of my awareness than memories formed in a different compartment yesterday. This leads to a lot of confusing experiences, like looking out of my window and expecting it to be winter but seeing that it’s actually summer, or all of a sudden noticing that the furniture in my apartment has moved from what I last remember, or looking at my plants and being amazed by how much they had grown because I remembered them being much smaller. These sorts of experiences occur on an a weekly to daily basis for me.

I’m still early on in my DID discovery journey, so my understanding of my amnesia will likely change over time as I learn more about how I operate. I hope this post serves as a snapshot in time of my awareness of how I operate a little over one year after starting therapy.